


A Manual for the Unexpected

by veilchenjaeger



Category: The Watchmaker of Filigree Street - Natasha Pulley
Genre: Fluff, Implied Sexual Content, M/M, Recovery, Synesthesia, a 5+1 of sorts, post-Pepperharrow
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-24
Updated: 2020-03-24
Packaged: 2021-03-01 00:35:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,509
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23296354
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/veilchenjaeger/pseuds/veilchenjaeger
Summary: Set after The Lost Future of Pepperharrow.Sometimes, it's the small things that reflect the big changes the most. Thaniel watches Mori adjust to all the everyday surprises that no one but a former clairvoyant could find in any way remarkable.
Relationships: Keita Mori/Thaniel Steepleton
Comments: 12
Kudos: 93





	A Manual for the Unexpected

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this for three reasons: One, these gorgeous books deserve more fanfic. Two, these characters deserve to be happy once in a while. Three, I wanted Mori to read a penny dreadful.

As it turned out, it was very easy for a British diplomat to hitch a boat ride back to London from Tokyo bay, but things got significantly more complicated when said diplomat was accompanied by a child, a disoriented Japanese baron and an owl, and had recently been beaten and shot out of a fair share of his already wavering health.

Dr Willis was more than sympathetic about Thaniel’s plans to leave Japan, and in fact said that he would have liked to advise him to be a bit more hassled about that than Thaniel was, but he estimated that it would take him at least two weeks of rest until he’d be fit to go on a journey of that calibre.

Thaniel spent most of that time at the Legation, translating the anxious diplomatic talks that had followed the past days’ chaos and quizzing the juniors on Japanese vocabulary whenever there wasn’t anything else to do, until Vaulker caught him and chased him out of the offices and back to bed to get some rest. He had taken an avid interest in Thaniel’s recovery, though he promised that it wasn’t motivated by wanting to have him out of the country.

On the fifth day, Thaniel found Mori in his usual spot by the window, watching the goings-on by the river like a play, and touched his shoulder to catch his attention.

“We should have lunch in town.”

Mori glanced up, surprised. He was surprised by the toll of the clock these days. “Is there something wrong with the kitchens again?”

“No, but I might go mad if I’m stuck in here for one more day.”

Mori stared into the distance, then thought better of it. “We’ll take Six,” he decided.

They found her by one of the telegraphs, fiddling with the wire under Pringle’s nervously watchful eyes. He looked grateful when she abandoned her investigation and ran to the door at the prospect of being anywhere but here. Thaniel subtly fixed up the wiring, nodded to Pringle and slid out of the room behind Six to find Mori waiting by the exit.

The weather had turned almost immediately after the generators at Aokigahara had been shut off. Of course, nobody officially knew that had happened, but the Legation had stopped heating with cutlery, Six’ lightbulbs didn’t glow when touched, and Tokyo wasn’t on fire anymore. Now and then, the ash still traced the outlines of a ghost, but they were fleeting now, just leftover energy. The sky had cleared up too. The river sparkled in soft flute tones in the spring sun.

They walked by the riverside for a while, Six trailing behind on Mori’s watch chain, then turned into an alley and followed the maze of streets. The soft wind was scattering ashes on Mori’s brown overcoat. There were remains of the fires here too. Some houses had burnt down completely, the black wooden planks of the ruins sticking out in grotesque shapes. But around that was a bustling crowd of people going about fixing up the damage or continuing their everyday lives, chatting amongst themselves about ghosts and where one could sell used lightbulbs.

They hadn’t gone out much, so Thaniel noted with surprise that he instinctively inserted himself between Mori and the other passers-by.

They ended up on a wider street flanked mostly by intact houses and humming with people flitting in and out of shops. A rickshaw rushed by and made Mori jump. Half the small buildings housed hole-in-the wall cookshops that blew steam out into the cool air.

Mori stopped by a corner and looked around, puzzled. “I have no idea where to go,” he marvelled. “As far as I know, any of these places could give us food poisoning.”

“They probably won’t,” Thaniel reassured him. He wanted to let Mori choose where to go, but he looked overwhelmed already, eyes darting to catch every movement on the busy street.

Six just wanted food, so Thaniel picked one of the several establishments advertising soba by the sound the colour of the cloth pieces made that were hung up in a garland covering the upper part of the shop front.

It was a small room with wooden walls and tiny tables. Thaniel let Mori give the order and ducked into one corner with Six, who sat down between the table and the wall. They had been out to eat at a place like this before and she enjoyed getting to put spring onions on her noodles.

She did so with great attention once there was a bowl of steaming soup in front of her. Then, she started picking the onion rings off one by one and ate them all before she touched the noodles.

Mori, meanwhile, let his chopsticks hover an inch above the soup like he couldn’t trust it not to be poison. He was fascinated by it. Slowly, he sank the chopsticks into the broth and stirred the noodles around.

“I don’t know how it will taste,” he mused. There was a spark in his eyes. “Don’t tell me.”

Thaniel didn’t. It was unremarkable anyways; just one of a million hot noodle soups cooked daily in Tokyo, not bad at all but nothing to write home about. If he’d known anyone who would have cared about this piece of information, he might have written home about the way Mori smiled when he found out how the soup tasted.

-

When they returned to Filigree Street, spring had reached London as well. The fog had cleared and a light, cool drizzle greeted them upon arrival. Mori walked around his shop with weary caution in his movements. Now and then, he picked up a piece of clockwork or opened a drawer and scowled at it like it would tell him its secrets if he was strict enough with it.

Thaniel left him to it and made tea while Six took Owlbert outside and explained the garden to him. Mori looked haggard when he came to the kitchen, like an ash ghost of himself, but he brightened when Thaniel handed him a cup of tea, and by the time it had gone dark, he was glowing a little in the sparkling electric lights.

They took Six to her attic together, because she had insisted, but only Mori was allowed to read from the manual she had picked out. Thaniel lounged about the room and listened with his eyes closed to gold drifting into amber.

Six dismissed them after two sections of the manual and settled into the pillows to read more by herself, and Thaniel followed Mori down the stairs and watched him make another pot of tea. They drank it together over the newspaper, catching up on British domestic politics. At some point, Katsu climbed up the table and into Mori’s arms. A while later, he stole a spoon and disappeared into the shop, where several of the clocks struck midnight in a navy symphony. Mori rolled up the newspaper, and when they got upstairs, he took Thaniel by the hand and pulled him into his bedroom.

There was something new about this, something relaxed and carefree. It had to do with the disappearance of a tension Thaniel hadn’t truly noticed until it was gone. It hadn’t been his own; he’d been aware of that. Mori moved more hesitantly now too, like he didn’t quite know where to put his hands, and he watched Thaniel’s reactions with far more intensity.

At first, Thaniel had thought that it had something to do with the injuries, that Mori didn’t want to disturb them, but it hadn’t changed anything when Willis had declared him healthy enough for travel and, implicitly, for any kind of touching that wasn’t designed to leave him bruised. The last night at the Legation, Thaniel had gotten so curious he’d asked.

“I don’t know what to do anymore,” Mori had said quietly, to which Thaniel had replied, “I’m fairly sure you have past memories of this.”

Mori had pinched his side, which had made them both laugh.

“I used to be able to tell what you’d like.” He had dragged his fingers over Thaniel’s chest like he was searching for something. “Now I have to guess. I have to relearn you, in a way.”

“Just assume I like everything unless I tell you otherwise,” Thaniel had said and taken Mori’s hand in his to guide it.

It hadn’t quite worked that way, and Mori had so far kept his new habit of watching, which Thaniel had realised he didn’t mind at all. It sparked something deep in his chest, something warm that sent cinders through his veins. It got even stronger here, in this familiar room, like a crackling log fire in a fireplace.

He felt like he should treat it with caution, go about this slowly, not just because his arm still stung when he moved it too suddenly. He pressed his face into the crook of Mori’s neck, lips on his collarbone, and thought while he idly let his hands wander.

Sleeping with a clairvoyant was a peculiar thing. It meant getting the reaction to everything a second before it happened. Thaniel had made a bit of a game of it eventually, trying out intentions and suddenly deciding differently and watching Mori react anyways. He hadn’t quite dared to take a die to the bedroom, but he’d played with the thought. It was a bit sad that he’d never get to find out what would happen if he ascribed an action to every side of the die.

“What are you thinking about?” Mori asked. Thaniel could feel the golden rumble of his voice through his skin.

He moved up and settled one arm on Mori’s chest. “I can’t make you feel what I intend to do anymore.”

Mori hummed. One of his hands came up to cradle the back of Thaniel’s head. A smile appeared on his lips and his eyes crinkled with an ease he’d never had before. “But you can surprise me,” he said, in the voice of someone who had just discovered the most wonderful thing in the world.

-

Thaniel left the Foreign Office earlier than usual.

He’d only been back for two weeks, but work at the Japan desk had been unusually busy due to the whole business with the abducted British scientist and the murder of a British citizen by nationalist rioters in front of the Legation and the narrowly averted, highly defaming murder charges against a British diplomat. After a few days of writing his own name in translations of the hasty correspondence between London and Tokyo, Thaniel had seriously considered wiring that he was fine, it had all been dealt with, and he would really appreciate if everyone could shut up about it.

Gradually, most of the dust had settled on the affair like flour on the by now world-famous ghosts of Tokyo: It had left a distinct impression, but stayed ultimately harmless.

Today, Francis Fanshaw had shown up at Thaniel’s desk and told him to go home, to make up for his overtime. When Thaniel had pointed out that he hadn’t stayed at the office that much longer than usual, Fanshaw had told him that one hour of work after the journey he’d had counted for two, and if it was spent talking about his own case in third person to Japanese diplomats, it counted for four.

If the subject annoyed Thaniel, it made Fanshaw furious, in his own ever-cheerful way. On Thaniel’s first day back at the office, Fanshaw had clapped him on the back and told him that he was very glad he hadn’t actually murdered anyone; he needed his only competent Japanese translator. That had been the only thing he’d said about it, but he quietly steamed over every message from Tokyo he saw.

With Fanshaw in a mood, work a surreal brand of enervating, and the colleagues from the other desks still out to discover what had really happened in Tokyo, Thaniel didn’t think twice about taking the rest of the afternoon off and was out of the Foreign Office within five minutes.

He had been longing for a chance to compose for a while now. There were harmonies haunting his mind, notes itching to be played on the tips of his fingers, all of them a glimmering shade of gold.

On his way to the tube station, he tried to see them between the dull green noise of the traffic. His fingers bobbed on imaginary piano keys, playing a yet unpolished part of what he knew would be his symphony. He was smiling with the thrill of it, and almost walked past a small patisserie when the blue sound of a flute cut through all the gold.

There was a tray of funny little cakes displayed in the shop window. They were different colours, all bright, but the blue stood out. It was the colour of clockwork in octopus arms.

The patisserie was dimly lit inside and plastered in French wallpaper. A middle-aged woman with a warm smile stood behind the counter and handled the cakes. Thaniel ordered the blue cake for Mori; then he picked a sunflower yellow one for Six and a green one for himself, and a pink one to have something to bribe Six.

The woman wrapped them in butter-yellow paper. Thaniel held the package in both hands for the whole tube ride, and only switched to lightly balancing it in one hand when he rounded the corner to Filigree Street.

The Haverly boys were causing a ruckus outside over some ball game or other. Their father was watching them wearily from the porch. Thaniel greeted him and he waved back with a smile, just as the ball flew over the fence and hit the house wall right next to the window. Thaniel turned away from the red voices that followed and fled the scene into the shop.

There was nobody inside, but it was open, and a clockwork bird was just on its way to settle by the window. Mori must have heard the door open, because he stepped out of the kitchen a moment later, only to stop in his tracks. He looked at Thaniel with wide eyes.

“Fanshaw sent me home early,” Thaniel explained. He lifted the cakes. “I brought a surprise.”

“You did.” Mori shook himself and his eyes refocused. “Of course you did.”

He crossed the shop with tentative steps, one foot in front of the other, until he was standing in front of Thaniel and looking down at the package. There was lettering on the paper, and the shape of the package made it obvious that it was cake. But it hid away the shapes of what was inside quite thoroughly.

Mori exhaled in a huff. “It’s driving me mad. I am losing my mind over something from a patisserie.”

“Is it alright?” Thaniel asked. He held the package out to Mori, who took it reverently.

“Oh, it’s fantastic.” His eyes gleamed when he looked up. “Six is upstairs.”

“I’ll fetch her. Don’t open that until we’re here.”

For a moment, Thaniel lingered by the staircase and watched Mori carry the package into the kitchen. His attention was fully focused on it. It was the easy, excited kind of concentration he had for creating impossible mechanisms.

“I won’t,” he promised. When Thaniel came back down the stairs with Six in tow, he was on a chair in the kitchen, still watching the package.

-

Spring turned into summer and the hesitant cool light that had peeked through the clouds in March settled and became a more comfortable summer sun, its rays warm and slightly yellow like the glow of a candle.

The hills outside the train window went by in a resounding melody of green, made brighter and louder by the sunlight. Thaniel thought about sketching the sound in notes to pass the time, but his head was full of symphonies, and he had brought the half-finished sheets of the first movement to go over when he found the time.

A week ago, they had received a letter from a friend of Mori’s about a house in Cornwall, the morning after they had talked about where they would go once summer ended and the fog returned. It was too impeccably timed to be a coincidence. Mori had stared at the letter and then at his own desk, like he was watching a past ghost of himself write the lines.

“I arranged this,” he had said with absolute certainty. “I remember doing it. I had just forgotten what I’d done it for.”

Thaniel had the feeling that they would grow accustomed to receiving notes from the past like that. As long as those took them on weekend trips to Cornwall and out of the city in winter, he wouldn’t complain, even if they came in the form of letters from people he wasn’t completely sure were real. Mori’s friend didn’t much sound like a real person. In the letter, he had offered to meet them in person later this year, even though they were welcome to have a look at the house before then. Thaniel was looking forward to that encounter, should it ever happen.

They had a compartment to themselves. It allowed Thaniel to nestle his foot between Mori’s ankles. Six had disappeared somewhere, probably on a quest to learn more about locomotives. They had hours left until they’d reach their destination, so she would find her way back in time.

Mori was engrossed in a penny dreadful he had bought at King’s Cross. Over the past months, he had become a bit of an avid reader, but his taste in literature was not nearly as refined as it was in most other areas. He had made quick work of Dickens and Wilde, but every now and then, Thaniel found him tucked away somewhere, reading a flimsy paperback with a title like _Spring-Heeled Jack: The Terror of London_.

The attention he paid to these stories was in itself captivating. Thaniel spied over the edge of his notebook, biting the inside of his cheek to stifle laughter as he watched Mori’s dark eyes race over the words on the page. The summer sun brought out the reddish tint of his hair and made the chain of his watch sparkle where it disappeared in his waistcoat pocket.

It took a while for him to look up. When he finally did, it must have been because he had caught Thaniel staring, since he gave him one of his questioning looks. They had once been a formality to make Thaniel say what Mori had already heard in his memory, and they were much more hesitant now than they had been then. At least, he didn’t get caught up in watching thin air anymore and went straight to asking.

“Do you know that those are terrible?” Thaniel asked and smiled, in case he didn’t know and would think him rude.

But Mori merely returned his gaze to the page with a nonchalant tilt of his head. “Of course. It’s not about the quality.”

“It’s about not knowing what happens,” Thaniel finished for him. He had to laugh. Out of all possible things, he hadn’t expected Mori to turn to sensationalism.

“Yes,” Mori said. The crinkles were back around his eyes. He lifted the book up and shook it lightly, so the thin pages made a soft white sound over the grey rattling of the train. “Sometimes, it even surprises me with a particularly awful turn of phrase. What are you writing?”

“A symphony,” Thaniel said, still smiling.

Mori’s eyes came up to settle on the notebook open in Thaniel’s lap and skimmed over the notes with keen interest, but he tore his gaze away and returned it to the book before long. He didn’t like to be spoiled for the final product.

-

Six had built an electric clockwork mechanism. It was small and simple, but it worked when attached to a power source. She had shown it to Thaniel and sworn him to secrecy under the terms of the agreement he had introduced to her the month before, which forbade them both from telling Mori about his birthday presents.

It had taken some convincing to make her agree, and even now, it was obvious that whenever Mori was in the room, she was itching to tell him like she had done the past years. But she distracted herself with clockwork parts and instruction manuals whenever that happened and kept quiet. 

Thaniel was overflowing with pride for her, and a little bit envious that she was handling the question of presents with so much ease. It was impossible to surprise a clairvoyant without putting in an immense effort, so not talking to Mori about his birthday presents had always been more of a ritual than a necessity. Six had never participated in it.

She had always given Mori something practical, most often something he could use for the workshop. So far, Thaniel had chosen presents by coming up with one idea after the other, strategically opening possible future paths, and picking the one that had made Mori smile the most. It had been a more convoluted version of asking him what he wanted.

With that method out of the question, he found himself in the peril of having no idea whether Mori would appreciate something. It threw him off so much that lastly, he settled on music, and a halfway finished piece at that. It had no grandeur as a gesture, but it was hard to go wrong with a personal note, and going without it for the first present he could give to Mori that would be a surprise seemed inappropriate.

He’d been working on a piece on the side, whenever he needed a break from thinking about the symphony. The idea behind it was to capture the shop in all its little oddities, like a journey through its four walls. There were parts for the clockwork birds, a lively theme for Katsu that showed up all over the place like the octopus himself, sunlight notes to describe the way the light fell into the shop in the afternoon, quieter ones for the silver sound of diamonds and tiny clockwork pieces being arranged into mechanisms. Its rhythm was the ticking of the clocks.

Thaniel decided to finish it as a gift by making the watchmaker enter his workspace. He was so used by now to putting Mori into music that it came easily, golden threads weaving into the melody almost on their own, until they overwhelmed everything else.

On the fourteenth, the summer sun was appropriately golden. Its light had turned into a rich amber by the time Thaniel got off work and onto the train with another small package of cakes and a bottle of good wine to get a bit drunk on once Six was asleep. He found Mori in the workshop, bent over a desk covered in clockwork and handling tiny diamond pieces with needle-thin pincers. He winced when he heard the door, but he didn’t drop anything.

Six was perched on a chair next to him and made cogs. Katsu was sitting on her shoulder and had three tentacles wrapped around her thin upper arm. When she spotted Thaniel, she put down what she was working on and in an instant was off the chair and halfway through the room. She stopped a metre in front of him and asked very seriously, “Are we celebrating now?”

Over at the table, Mori’s eyebrows climbed up to his hairline. He gave Thaniel a quick look before returning to his work.

“I’ll have to ask, petal,” Thaniel said and crossed the room, Six on his heels at an appropriate distance. “Kei?”

“Give me—” Mori trailed off and stared blankly at the entrails of the pocket watch he was making. “Five minutes?” he finished with a fair bit of hesitation.

It took him six minutes, which seemed to bug him a bit, but gave Thaniel enough time to make tea and Six to go grab her clockwork and generator from upstairs. Mori was astonished by it. He watched with widened eyes as Six’ quick hands worked to power up the mechanism and the cogs started turning. Thaniel didn’t know enough about clockwork to know what it did, but Mori seemed to and bent forward to watch the gears with unabashed fascination.

“You made this for me?” he asked Six.

She thought about that for a moment. Finally, she settled on, “I made it because I wanted to. But you should have it because you taught me how.”

“Thank you,” Mori said in Japanese, which had the inflection English lacked to clarify how deeply he meant it. Six switched to Japanese as well to tell him he was welcome.

She explained the mechanism to them in detail while they sat together, drank the tea and finished off the cake. The sky outside was red when Thaniel carried the dishes into the kitchen, uncorked the bottle of wine and poured two glasses. Mori swirled and smelled his with interest and his brows went up in appreciation when he tasted it. He gave Thaniel one of the fleeting, soft looks he got when he was pleasantly surprised. They had become quite common lately, for obvious reasons, but they weren’t entirely new. Thaniel had used to run into them every now and then with something he’d said, or some new decision Mori evidently hadn’t expected.

He smiled back and set his own glass down on the table to undo his cufflinks. Mori’s eyes flickered to his wrists.

“I composed you something,” Thaniel said as he walked over to the piano and rolled up his sleeves. “I couldn’t come up with much else. If it’s alright with you, petal?”

Six gave an affirmative nod, directed more at the mechanism she was fiddling with than at Thaniel. He smiled gratefully anyways and started to play, eyes closed to concentrate fully on the picture of the shop the music painted behind his lids and not on the nagging question if it was fulfilling its purpose at all.

When Mori entered the imaginary workshop in golden ornaments, weaving into the space and the melody slowly and naturally before he’d take over the next phrase like he usually captured Thaniel’s attention, Thaniel finally glanced over at where he was watching with his legs crossed and one of his rare wholly enraptured smiles.

The wine in his glass threw little waves with how his hand shook.  
-

Summer drifted into autumn with a wave of unsteady rain intercepted by patches of sunlight between heavy clouds. It was still warm enough, but in the evening, the first fires lit all around London mixed with the steady smoke of the factory chimneys and Thaniel could feel his lungs grow heavier with each breath. It wasn’t yet enough to be concerned, according to Dr Haverly, but they would be off to Cornwall as soon as the fog came back.

Gilbert and Sullivan had another show planned for December and Thaniel might have to return for the premiere at least, so he wanted to leave sooner rather than later. He was working on the final version of the overture when Mori let out a disgruntled sigh over on the sofa, got up and wandered over to the piano with a scowl on his face.

Thaniel let the music fade out with a last cadence. His hands hovered over the keys as he met Mori’s eyes.

“No, go on,” Mori said quickly. In his right hand, he had a book, which he now set down on top of the piano and continued glowering at. It looked new and the second half showed no sign of use. Thaniel picked it up to inspect the title; it was some kind of detective novel he hadn’t heard of before.

He returned his hands to the keys and absentmindedly resumed playing where he had left off. It was a good sign that he was able to play without giving it much thought; he had already committed most of the overture to memory.

“Not a very good one?” he asked over the music, with a nod in the direction of the book.

“It’s utterly predictable.” Mori said it like he took that as a personal offence. “The gardener did it.”

“Isn’t it always the gardener who did it?”

Mori hummed disapprovingly; his old aversion to reading had left him with a lack of experience in the area, which might explain his predilection for mediocre sensationalism. Thaniel made a half-hearted attempt to look apologetic, but his hands moved in tune with the quick rhythm of the overture that reflected the opera’s comic tone too well not to lift his spirits and pull the corners of his mouth up in a smile.

It widened when Mori’s hands settled lightly on his shoulders, his thumbs drawing circles on both sides of Thaniel’s spine.

“I don’t read to know the resolution halfway through.”

“Maybe you should give Sherlock Holmes a try again,” Thaniel suggested, though it was unlikely to convince Mori. He had too many past memories of being bored of it.

“Curiously,” he said, “I still prefer your endings to those.”

“I could give this one a new ending as well. Tell me the plot tonight, and I’ll see what I can come up with.”

“I might,” Mori warned him.

The overture reached its grand finale, which the orchestra would paint in vibrant colours all over the halls of the Savoy. In the small rooms of Filigree Street, the piano alone covered the walls in specks of Mediterranean indigo. On Thaniel’s shoulders, Mori tapped out the rhythm.

“Where’s Six?” Thaniel asked while his hands played the last phrases.

Mori’s fingers stilled as he circled through his ritual of knowing, not knowing, and sorting through past and missing future memories. Thaniel had made a habit of asking him questions without clear answers, to get him more used to guessing.

“In the garden. She was talking to her owl the last time I saw her.”

Owlbert had stayed, even as most other owls in Filigree Street had gradually left over the past months. He knocked on Thaniel’s window sometimes and slept on the pillow. Hopefully, he wouldn’t learn anything from Katsu and start stealing socks.

Thaniel nodded, played the last note with a flourish, and turned around on his chair. He caught Mori’s hands in his as they dropped from his shoulders.

“I’m done here. What do you think about taking her on a walk?”

“Anything that isn’t reading,” Mori said with another dark look at the book. “It’s tedious.”

They did find Six in the garden, though she had moved on to inspecting one of the clockwork fireflies that she had apparently dug out of the ground. There was a badly patched-up spot on the lawn. Mori sighed, held out a hand wordlessly and placed the firefly back in the soil when Six reluctantly gave it back.

She was more enthusiastic about the walk. In a line of thought Thaniel couldn’t quite follow, she insisted that she had to take a thermometer, and hurried upstairs to fetch it. They left the door open for her when they went ahead and stepped out into the street, so she would know where they had gone.

Filigree Street was bathed in soft autumn light. The fickle rain the clouds had dropped so hesitantly all morning that it had seemed like they couldn’t quite make up their mind about it had stopped completely now. A cool gust of wind carried a mixture of rain-fresh air and city dust that confused Thaniel’s lungs so much he had to clear his throat in surprise. He pulled his coat tightly around his shoulders and watched Mori do the same two steps ahead.

There were few people on the street. Even the otherwise ever-present children’s yells were only distant and muffled behind the house walls, but the Haverly cat was out and shot across the street like the devil was after it.

Mori jumped back a whole step, right into Thaniel, who caught him with both hands on his shoulders.

“Are you alright?”

“In a fashion.” Mori exhaled heavily and stepped out of their accidental embrace. He blinked away the haunted look in his eyes, which obediently made way for a brief laugh. “I’d need one of Six’ instruction manuals on how to deal with the unexpected.”

“We’ll train you,” Thaniel said and inclined his head in the direction of the city around them. “See this as practice. Who knows what the birds in the park will do?”

They could hear Six’ footsteps on the staircase, so they stepped aside to make way for her in the doorway. Mori’s fingers brushed Thaniel’s wrist, briefly enough to pass as an accident and too gently not to be wholly intentional. He had one of his new easy smiles again, complete with alert eyes and crinkles around them.

“Let’s find out.”

**Author's Note:**

> Send me boxes full of moths on [Tumblr](https://veilchenjaeger.tumblr.com)


End file.
